Yes, today in our “31 Days of our Favorite Things” series, Matt Hester is talking about Gremlins; specifically, the kinds of nasty things that can happen to an Active Directory domain controller that is virtualized, and when you attempt to restore an old snapshot or a backup of that virtual machine.

Ah… In Windows Server 2012 we introduce something called the VM-GenerationID attribute. I’ll let Matt give you all the details, but basically this little item allows a safe restore of an old copy of AD. It also enables the ability to quickly create new domain controllers as clones of an original virtual machine. Pretty slick stuff!